Brian Thompson, Founder of Law & Motion, joins the podcast to talk about physical fitness for attorneys and others in the legal profession. Brian is a practicing attorney who made a lifestyle change at the start of his legal career to put more of a focus on his physical fitness. He talks with Dr. Bill Kanasky, Jr. about the stresses of the attorney profession and how those demands make it easy to put off being healthy and physically fit and what some tips are to overcoming these obstacles. Bill has experience with clinical research on physical fitness and shares results from his dissertation on why people quit exercise programs, which is the biggest challenge with any exercise regime. The top two predictors of why people stop exercising are pain (overdoing it) and illogical, unmet expectations. Bill asks Brian to weigh in on how to address these predictors of why people stop exercising and they also talk about the necessity of a strong, healthy diet in addition to a solid exercise plan. Lastly, Brian shares his thoughts on fad diets, how to think about the gym as the practice ground for where you practice for your daily life activities, and how to make a plan for better health and physical fitness.
Full Episode Transcript
[00:00] Bill Welcome to another edition of the Litigation Psychology Podcast. I am Dr. Bill Kanasky. This, as you know, is brought to you by Courtroom Sciences. Visit www.courtroomsciences.com for all your litigation support needs. Yes, buy that mock trial, buy that focus group, prep your witness appropriately. And this guy I have with me, he knows a little something about witness prep because he’s an attorney, but he’s got a very, very interesting story. And I went out and I found this guy, I said, “I need this guy on the show because this guy has very important information that’s never been discussed on this podcast before.” Mr. Brian Thompson, Law & Motion. Brian, how you doing today?
[00:41] Brian I’m doing well, Bill. I really appreciate you having me on today.
[00:48] Bill Oh, this is going to be fascinating because, uh, little, little do people know—a couple people do know this—I double majored in exercise science at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and then when I got my PhD in clinical psychology, it was in behavioral medicine. And I largely focused on diet behavior, exercise behavior. So you and I have some interesting, uh, backgrounds here. You’re an attorney and you—I looked up, I looked at your website, looking at it right now, and you’re focusing on getting attorneys fit and in shape. Tell me about your journey, where you started and how it got here, because I find this fascinating.
[01:29] Brian Sure. Um, well yeah, I’ve been a practicing attorney for about, uh, 14 years now. And right around the time that I was studying for the bar exam, you know, we all kind of know what a time suck that is. Um, I, uh, coincidentally during that, uh, those few months, sprained my knee, uh, just kind of playing some recreational soccer. Um, and so between being wrapped up in a knee brace and spending all my hours, uh, with, uh, the books open, I put on a little extra fluff. Um, and this was right around, right around age 30.
And, uh, up until then I’d always kind of had some vague ambitions about getting in shape. “Oh, one day when I get in really good shape.” Um, and so after that bar experience and after the knee healed and after I sort of assessed, uh, you know, that my new, uh, age bracket here, um, I said, “You know, well Brian, when is this gonna happen? Um, you know, when, uh, you know, when is this just gonna—uh, when are you gonna be more affirmative or proactive about this?” And so then and there I decided I was going to make a lifestyle change. I was going to start going to the gym more, eating better.
And I realized that it wasn’t just sort of a short-term fix or a short-term goal to just have say six-pack abs or something like that. I wanted to do a life overhaul. Um, and I wanted to do it while, um, also being involved and committed to my new profession. So I wanted to, uh, you know, show myself that—that you can have both. Uh, both be a practicing attorney and prioritize, uh, health and fitness.
[03:06] Bill That’s, that’s really an unbelievable story. Uh, well, congratulations number one because you—you look like you’re in great shape. I have to tell you, I’ve been working, uh, uh, in litigation for—this is, I’m going on my 18th year. Um, I’m going to tell you something that you already know, two things. Number one: particularly in litigation, trial attorneys, this is a very, very stressful area of law. Maybe the most stressful. Number one. Maybe, maybe a divorce attorney may be number one, but it’s at least tied, right? So number one, right? Very, very stressful.
Number two: many folks relying on the billable hour for their income, which really—talk about a time suck. Can you talk about the just inherent challenges for the attorney that exists that really—I mean, the cards are kind of stacked against the the litigator, the trial attorney because of the intense amount of time towards the job. I think in many cases that sets them up for disaster. And then by the time they figure out—and you had that kind of come to Jesus moment of, “Hey, I need to—” Ch—sometimes when that happens, they’re so far down the road they don’t feel like they can do it. Talk just a little bit about the attorney set up and how it’s really built against—against really being in shape and being healthy.
[04:26] Brian Yeah, well, you know Bill, you nailed it when you referenced a lack of time, right? Time is the one thing, um, that we can’t manufacture more of. And it seems like there’s this pressure, especially on litigators, to if you have any extra time during your day, bill more hours, be more productive. And we sort of glorify overworking in our culture. And of course that’s maybe a larger philosophical, uh, discussion in and of itself.
But you know, if you ask busy professionals, attorneys, and particularly litigators, “What is your biggest obstacle to exercising more, eating better, etc.?” They’ll say time. It’s just a lack of time. Not only, uh, the jobs of the, uh—the demands of the job, but also, you know, you get home if you have a family, if you have a significant other, um, you know, those place extra demands on your time. And pretty soon you tally up all the hours that you have to allocate to these, um, priorities in your life, and you know, when do we have time to—to work out, to take care of ourselves, right?
And so, um, you know, it’s—and it’s not just the lack of time too, but there’s also the work environment, uh, that attorneys find themselves in. You know, we’re chained to our desk most of the time. We have electronic devices that we just interact in terrible, uh, positions with. Um, we’re often at that desk. We’re often sitting. We are—we—if we drive a car, we sit while we commute. We just assume these poor postural positions for long periods, you know? And that leads to not only some obvious orthopedic problems, but also other chronic health issues: obesity, diabetes, etc. So there is really this, um, toxic setup that attorneys and litigators have to confront, uh, if they want to even put in the kind of the basic maintenance, uh, that their—their bodies require.
[06:34] Bill Yeah, that is really important and let’s—I want to focus on some of this posture, okay? So for 18 years I’ve been bouncing around from city to city, always on the move, right? And I—I never sat at a desk, ever. And then COVID hit, and then every—I mean, and by the way, Zoom, I’m going to tell you, I’m sending the CEO of Zoom a Christmas card, right? Maybe a fruit basket during the holidays to say thank you for saving my career, because otherwise it would have been put on hold for a year. So we figured out, hey, we could do a lot of our work—our meetings, our witness prep, hell even some focus groups—via Zoom.
So for the first time in my life, I sat in this chair, the same one I’m talking to you in, pretty much five days a week for six to ten hours a day. Brian, after—after two months of this, I woke up one morning, I looked at my—I said, “I can’t move, I can’t get out of bed.” She took me to my doctor. He’s like, “Did you get into a car crash?” I go, “No,” I go, “I go, I can’t move. I feel—I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. I feel like complete dog.” And he said—he checked me out and he’s like, “Well, what have you been doing?” I go, “I’ve been working on Zoom all day.” And he goes, “At the desk?” I go, “Yeah.” And he goes, “I think I know your problem.”
I mean, it really, while it helped me with my career, for the first time ever, like you said, very forward posture. So I started to become kyphotic. Everything was in front of me, right? I had a decent office chair, but the sitting, the sitting, the sitting. All these aches and pains. And so what my, um, uh, wife did was she went out and got me a standing desk. The standing desk, I think, could be the greatest invention. And so what I do now, I’ll do my podcast from here and then over there I have a standing desk. It’s on wheels. I can wheel it around the room. I can put it in front of a monitor and watch the news while I work. Talk to me about how this is really, really a good idea. I’ve seen it catching on in corporate America, but just standing all day makes a huge impact on your posture and on your physical health, right?
[08:47] Brian Absolutely. Um, you know, lack of movement is kind of the real enemy. Um, and—and as you’ve kind of described, this sedentary, um, office environment or our sedentary lifestyles are really sort of a—um, a silent enemy here. They’re not, uh—they don’t obviously lead to some of these problems the way like if you, uh, fell on your bike or if you were in a car accident. It’s easy to link these single discrete traumatic events to, uh, you know, pain that we might be feeling.
But you know, if our only problem is just, you know, sitting all day or adopting poor postures, they can kind of sneak up on us because our bodies are really resilient machines. They have all these redundant systems built into them so that we can, um, even, you know, experience pain or injury and still accomplish the tasks that, uh, we need our bodies to accomplish. So adopting poor postures like sitting, for example, the way you described for those few months, um, that can work until one day it doesn’t, right?
And that’s kind of what you experience is that all of a sudden, you know, this nagging—this nagging pain starts to kind of creep up on us and the cause isn’t always obvious until someone clues us into, “Well, what have you been doing all day?” “Well, I’ve—I’ve changed my routine and I’m sitting a lot now.” “Ah, there we go,” right? So we’ve kind of spotted the culprit.
So you know, these, um, you know, posture is kind of really the—the key, um, concept I think to think about. Um, and I’ve—I always suggest: think of the word posture as just another word for position, right? Um, and there’s—there’s two types of—of posture: there’s static and dynamic posture. And so, you know, what in the world is that? Static, you know, as—as its name implies, that—that’s, you know, our—our body’s alignment in our—in our joint position while we’re sitting still. Dynamic is our alignment during movement, and including those movement patterns themselves. And not only those movement patterns, but the muscles we recruit to accomplish those tasks.
And then if we find ourselves sitting or in otherwise adopting poor positions for long periods of times, we start to develop muscle imbalances, um, and then compensations just as kind of workarounds. Yeah, and again, those will work for a while until one day they don’t, um, and they start to lead to dysfunction and pain. So that kind of defines the, um—like the—the conceptually, um, the problem and—and what, um, you know, what we’re facing in terms of the causes of—of chronic pain for—for sedentary individuals.
[11:35] Bill Yeah, now I’m gonna—we’re gonna end the podcast later with talking about how to—how to form a plan. Because this has to be attacked from a—comfort because you got the time issue, you got the, uh, settings issue, the environmental issues. Now we’re going to—we’re going to work up to that, but let’s kind of cover another couple of bases.
So again, little do people know, I did my dissertation on the factors of why people quit exercise programs. Now when I brought this in front of my committee at the University of Florida, they’re like, “Now wait a second, like you—no, no, you want to study how to get people to exercise.” And I said, “No.” I go, “Everybody,” I go, “on January 2nd, everybody exercises.” I go, “Getting somebody to exercise is not the problem in this country. It’s getting people to stop quitting.” We have a bunch of quitters in this society. Hate to tell you, that’s what they are, they’re quitters, right? And I want to figure out, why are people starting on January 2nd, but then by mid-February they’ve quit their New Year’s resolution? What’s going on?
The two predictive factors that were out of this world, and they kind of correlate—there’s a little interaction effect. Number one: pain. Meaning these people jumped right into the pool in the deep end. They didn’t start in the kitty shallow end and worked their selves up to the deep end. They went on—they probably got some bodybuilding website or some other website like, “You got to do this and six days a week,” and they jumped in. And I think they got in way over their heads early, they never—their bodies were never really able to adapt. They went to—and well, let’s say, around Orange Theory wasn’t around in, uh, 19, uh, you know, or 2003, but probably went to some gym or hired a trainer who just worked their ass off, right? And then they came home and then every day they wake up like, “Oh my god, this hurts, I can’t move.” And it was a very—it was almost punishment for exercising. That was the top predictor of why people were quitting.
Number two, which I think is a really fascinating psychological part: illogical and unmet expectations. They would go work out for six weeks, hop on the scale like, “Oh my—I only lost two pounds. Oh, well—well, this sucks.” So knowing those two things that I found in my research, so if an attorney—and many—a lot of attorneys really don’t have a big exercise background or physical activity background—if I’m an attorney and I come to you, Brian, I say, “Hey listen, I want to get healthy, you know, I don’t have a lot of—I don’t know where to start. Can you help me?” How do you kind of get somebody started on the right—on the right plan so they’re not gonna hurt themselves either physically or psychologically? And then number two, to educate them on expectations? Because here’s the other problem with our society: it’s a instant gratification, right? Everything’s fast, fast, fast. You don’t—everything’s easy street. One, two, three, easy street. How do you set up your clients for both physical and mental success?
[14:45] Brian Great questions. Um, so I think to the first point, you always want to meet somebody where they’re at in terms of their current fitness level, but also their, you know, the motivation, the time they have. the interest, uh, their particular fitness discipline or modality, and the interest they have in that.
One of the first questions I would always ask a client is, “You know, have you worked with a trainer before? And if you did, what did you like about that experience and what did you not like about that experience?” And that question, I’m trying to elicit, um, you know, what sort of style, uh, motivates you. What sorts of exercise modalities? Maybe it was, um, uh, you know, weightlifting or, uh, say boxing or some—what, uh, what particular fitness modality did you find the most motivating?
Because it’s almost a cliche in the fitness world: the best workout is the one that you do, right? It’s less important, you know, how much weight you’re lifting or a particular exercise that you’re doing. What is going to motivate you to get to the gym and actually complete your workout routine? Um, so to the second point about managing expectations, I always imagine—I have never driven a cargo container ship in my life—but I am—what I think what the—the strategy is is a little adjustment in direction over time is going to get you to a very different place. But you have to learn to love the process and you have to be patient. Right?
Um, sticking with the vehicle analogy, if you’re driving your car down the highway and you want rapid change and you just flip the wheel over as hard as you can, chances are you’re going to flip the car over and it’s going to be a disaster. Well, the same thing kind of happens if you try to make a radical change in your fitness routine and you try to overhaul your life in order to get that immediacy—those immediate results—you’re just going to flip the car and it’s going to be a disaster and you won’t stick with it. You’ll probably get injured. Um, so it’s learning to love the process and it’s just trusting the process as well because sustainability is the key to any health and fitness routine, right? Anything that you don’t—that you aren’t able to sustain across a long period of time, um, is just not going to be successful.
[17:23] Bill Yeah, because if you don’t like—if you don’t like what you’re doing, you’re not going to keep doing it. For example, I don’t run. I hate it. I get epically bored. I cannot stand it. I would rather get a steak knife and just repeatedly stab myself in the face because running, it’s just boring. I can’t stand it number one—and hey, I have a lot of football injuries, so it makes it—just, it causes a lot unnecessary pain.
So I decide for a lot of the cardio I like to do, I like to box, I like to walk, I like to get on a treadmill and put it on the incline and walk and put my headset in. I’m good with that. So I think—I think you’re right. Finding something that fits your needs because remember: calories burned is calories burned, whether you’re walking, you’re running, you’re jogging, uh, you’re doing yoga. There’s so many things out there and I think it’s important for people to—to—to—to find something they have fun with.
And by the way, the other thing I hate doing—there’s two things I hate doing: I hate running, I hate working out with somebody else. I like my alone time. Get away from me. I like to be alone. But I think there’s a lot of social benefits to exercise where you can meet with a group and get social support if you like to get together with the guys and lift weights, or if other folks, uh, want to get into that, you know, 30-minute yoga class or the—the 30-minute Zumba, whatever. I think it’s important to meet everybody’s needs on that thing, uh, so that they really like what they’re doing.
Now let’s get to something very controversial, which has been controversial. And again, this is why I kind of left the fitness and health industry to go into litigation for a number of reasons, but this is what made me really, really upset. So right around the year 2000—I sent you this link—the University of Florida got awarded a huge NIH grant to study the interaction between exercise and weight loss. And, um, we—so I worked on this, and it’s part of what—that’s where I got my dissertation data from. And we cracked the code. I mean, we were—and this was with walking. The only thing we did was have people walk different intensities and different frequencies, right? To see what was working. Really what—and everything was even different age groups. It was a huge sample as well, over 500 people. And every group made progress. Every group made progress, Brian.
And we’re talking—we’re—we’re working with the cardiology program, nutritionist, you name it. We had blood pressure coming down, resting heart rate coming down, cholesterol coming down. You name it, every single category of wellness and fitness and health. The bad stuff came down, the good stuff went up, right? LDL cholesterol through the roof—everything. We cracked the code. We published the results. Crickets. That’s all. Here’s—here’s what you heard after the results: chirp, chirp, chirp.
Meanwhile, I turn on my TV and I’ve got Denise what’s-her-name telling me, “Hey yo, spend 100 bucks on this,” or somebody trying to sell me this. And what I figured out was like, “Oh my gosh, society doesn’t like these answers,” which is really science, right? They love—they want the quick fix.
But let’s get to the controversial part of weight loss. One of the main findings that we already kind of knew was going to happen, but was highly disappointing to our subjects: they had—so you give them this printout, “Hey, here’s your blood pressure, your heart rate, your—your—your LDL, your HDL,” and you show them all this like, “Wow, look at—” And know what they were like? They were like, “Okay.” We’re like, “No, this is like—this is going to make you live 10 years longer.” And their response was, “And?” And we’re like, “Okay, well time out, what the hell is wrong with you?” And they’re like, “Well, I kind of expected to lose more weight.”
And what they failed to understand, which the society still does not get this: if you want to lose weight, okay, it’s largely an eating behavior. It’s not an exercise issue. So what I try to explain to people—my wife did the same thing. She’s like, “I’ve been doing all this stuff and I’m not losing weight.” And I said, “Well, you can work out balls to the wall for 30 straight minutes and guess what? You’re gonna—like you’re gonna burn 150 to 250 calories, which by the way is like a bottle of Mountain Dew. Okay?” In other words, the body’s not designed to expend large amounts of energy to decrease weight. This is from an evolutionary cycle, right? We’re designed to keep weight on to protect ourselves. Okay? It’s not—rapid weight losses are not good for the body. And so what a lot of people don’t understand is that exercise plays a role, but it’s largely eating—be—no pun intended—it’s largely eating behavior that’s going to make a huge difference there.
How do you talk to your clients, your attorney clients that have these expectations when they want to lose weight? Because I imagine you get—you get a lot of weight loss calls, right? And they want some magic pill. How do you balance their expectations and then educate them on the balance between, “Yes, exercise is going to be important, but you need to make some changes in the kitchen as well”?
[22:28] Brian Yeah, you know Bill, the golden rule, and you alluded to it, is: you can’t out-exercise a bad diet. You can’t do it. Yeah. So if you want to really overhaul your commitment to health and fitness, it can’t just be done dedicating an extra hour of your day in the gym. You’ve really got to, uh, revamp a lot of your daily habits. Uh, and if, uh, weight loss is your goal, the biggest focus has got to be on, uh, your food choices, both in quality and in quantity.
Um, and it’s, you know, it’s just about, um, committing to making, uh, you know—I’d say better food choices. Uh, I’d say about 80—I follow the 80/20 rule myself, um, and that’s kind of the—the suggestion I impart on clients is that 80 percent of the time, choose, uh, clean, quality, whole, less—zero to less to no processed foods. Uh, and then 20 percent of the time, you know, allow yourself to, um, have in reasonable portions, um, you know, the foods that you do most enjoy. Um, and in that—within that the scope of that 20%, one of my favorite sayings is: make a better bad decision.
What do I mean by that? Right? Is that if you’re going to—if you’re—if you’re committed to having—so you’re out at a restaurant, you’re committed to having dessert that night. Rather than the 1500 calorie lava cake, yeah, maybe choose the sorbet, right?
[24:08] Bill Or, right, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[24:15] Brian So, you know, we start to, you know, just—or if, um, if you are gonna have the lava cake, “I’m only going to eat, you know, a half of it or a third of it,” right? So it’s that if you’re going to take the quote-unquote bad decision, right, you find a way to improve it so that it is less detrimental to, uh, you know, the diet plan that you’re working with.
[24:34] Bill Yeah, it’s, uh—it’s a—it’s a significant problem. And I think we’ve seen some changes. You know, restaurant menus generally now give you the calories. It’s—the calories are printed out like right next to the… and you know, if you just know how to do math, I think that there’s some—there’s some really good things that you can do because it is all math. It’s cool, you know? It’s—it’s—it’s input versus output. And over time, it is going to happen.
What—what are your thoughts, um—and again, this is where I think things get dangerous and there’s a lot of expectation let downs and people quit. I don’t like quitters, by the way, Brian. They make me nuts. But people jump on these fad diets. What has been your—like for example, the keto diet is very—is very popular. I actually did that for some time. I felt fantastic and that—I didn’t need to—like, I didn’t need to lose weight, I’m in great shape, but I—I just heard the—just the physical and mental, you know, results of that, meaning really getting your carbs low, more higher protein. That—really, I really liked that. Now I still kind of keep it more on the protein and less the carbs. Probably not in ketosis. But what are kind of the pros and cons of these diets that come out? Because everybody starts ranting and raving, everybody gets excited and then you hear, “You’re—oh my neighbor’s doing the South Beach diet, oh this neighbor’s doing keto.” How do you deal with that in your practice? Because a lot of this stuff is just…
[25:59] Brian Right. I mean, well yes, so I always preface this with: I’m not a dietitian. Um, so with that caveat sort of laid out in front of us, um, I always—so I—I live in Silicon Valley, which is always looking for the next biohack, right? Um, and you know, it’s—the traditional methods of calories in, calories out is always going to be your base formula, right?
Any fad diet that gets away from that or tells you you don’t have to, uh, factor that basic formula in as the foundational component of weight loss, um, I think is just bunk, right? Um, the simple, uh, tried and true of eating, uh, fewer processed foods in smaller quantities, um, upping your activity level—that is the formula that will be here, has been here before all the fad diets, and will be here long after because, at bottom, it is the most effective formula.
[27:11] Bill Absolutely. My grandmother—my grandmother lived to 96 years old and never—never exercised the day in her life. But you know what she did? She did the laundry, she did the dishes, she cleaned every day, she gardened. Very, very active on her feet person. Can you describe the—the importance of physical activity? Exercise is only a form of physical activity. There can be times, particularly on the weekends, that you—I mean, if you—you can go on several websites, uh, whether, you know, you have to paint a room or do some work in the—there’s a lot of yard work, raking. I mean, if you start looking at the physical activity you can do that’s not an exercise, all of that counts, right?
[27:53] Brian Absolutely. In fact, Bill, I think you’ve kind of hit on a really key point. And this is something I like to emphasize to clients too, is that the gym—like we think of exercise and fitness, we think of like a health club, right? Or we think of our home gym. I encourage people to reconceptualize how they view their traditional gym, and that is: it is a laboratory or a practice ground for functional movement.
And the functional movements that we engage in in our lives every day—the—the yard work, the laundry, the, you know, the painting, um, you know, painting our houses, uh, you know, whatever the—the physical activity is—mirrors movements that we have an opportunity to practice in the gym, right? If I’m doing a deadlift in the gym, right, picking up a weighted barbell up off the ground, what is that—what is that functional pattern mirror? Picking up a heavy laundry basket, right?
If I’m doing heavy farmers carries with a dumbbell in each hand and I’m—I’m pacing across the gym, what does that look like? Looks like carrying heavy grocery bags home from the supermarket, right? If I’m lifting something and putting it up overhead like a dumbbell or a barbell, what does that look like? Right, it looks like putting away an appliance in the highest cabinet in my kitchen, right?
If I’m, uh, doing squats in the gym, what does that look like? It looks like getting up and down off the sofa, right? So these functional movements in our lives, we have an opportunity to practice good movement habits and muscle recruitment in the gym. So I encourage people: think of the gym not as just the place you go to burn a bunch of calories, but it’s the place you go to practice good movement patterns and you can do it with resistance or under load because we have weights there—dumbbells, barbells, etc., kettlebells.
We can practice these basic human movement patterns: hip hinges, right? Squats, overhead presses, vertical presses, pulling movements. All of these movement patterns that we can apply to accomplishing our daily tasks, home chores, etc., throughout the rest of our day. So think of the gym not as the goal or the place, but rather the practice ground so that you can get better at the movements that you apply throughout the rest of your day.
[30:26] Bill That’s—that is—that is awesome. Now you can’t see it, but right behind this camera is a dumbbell rack that goes from six pounds all the way to, uh, 65 pounds, and that’s in my home office. However, I tell all my clients because they’re like, “How do you stay in such good shape?” I mean, I have this—I mean, between phone calls I’ll go—I’ll go, you know, crank out a set of curls, whatever.
But I got—I—so this—this exercise band, by the way, I got a little 30-pounder right here. I have this on me everywhere I go. It fits in my bag everywhere I go. And between Zoom calls or phone calls, what I can do with this band is really incredible. So even if I—if I know, “You know what, boy, I got a lot of Zoom today, this is going to be tough, it’s a lot of desk time,” I have this. I have those. And I’m not saying to put a—a—a rack of dumbbells in your—in your—in your office at the… but you can—those bands are very, very effective. You go to your local sporting goods store and they—I think they start at five pounds and they go all the way—over here I have on my door all the way to 100 pounds. And you can do a lot of stuff with those bands even in a busy office environment, and a lot of people just don’t know about that. So I hope you’re a big proponent of the bands when the gym’s not available.
[31:40] Brian Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and you can travel with them. Um, you know, even—even the smallest dumbbell, of course, is going to weigh your luggage down. So but you—you start traveling with resistance bands, um, those things are a great portable exercise tool. Absolutely excellent.
[31:58] Bill All right, so let’s wrap this up. So if somebody wants to—now, are you—do you just work in—in your geographical area? Is that pretty much how you do it?
[32:06] Brian So these days I see clients exclusively over Zoom, actually. So, uh—so I’m certainly not limited to the San Francisco Bay Area. Um, and the focus has been on, uh, corrective exercise. So I’m doing—working, uh, with clients less in traditional exercise programs, you know—the push-up—push-ups, pull-ups, squats, uh, you know, barbell work, dumbbell work, etc.
And I’ve shifted the focus of my work, um, to corrective exercise. And which, uh, is a mobility routine that addresses kind of the problems that we were talking about, uh, kind of at the top of the show here. Um, it’s supposed to address these muscle imbalances, these movement compensations, these poor static and dynamic postures. And the great thing about that, uh, type of programming and type of work with clients is it lends itself perfectly to Zoom and in-home environment.
You notice that I’m coming to you—my couch is in the background. Uh, the clients that I’m working with, they’re in a similar, you know, limited space in their living room. Um, but that is actually an ideal environment in which to develop and maintain a mobility practice, right? Is because it’s accessible, right? I don’t have to—to sell a client on, “Oh, in order to—uh, to do this mobility routine, you also have to go out and get a gym membership,” right? Because then they’re thinking, “Well, now there are all these obstacles in my way because I have to—am I going to go to the gym before work or after work, or am I going to come home first but then I have to get in my car or, you know, drive to the gym?” Here I can show you that this—you know, your living room is accessible to you, and that makes your mobility routine and practice more accessible to you.
[33:57] Bill Yeah, and I bet—and I’m assuming this is part of your service that you provide—is that when an attorney calls you and wants to get started, I’m assuming you’re going to probably take that—you’re going to ask a lot of questions about their particular situation and really customize the program to them, correct?
[34:15] Brian Absolutely. Absolutely. The first thing I do is obviously: consult your doctor. Not only—that’s not only the lawyer in me, um, the disclaimer, right? Um, but it also underlines the point that, you know, your doctor is going to be more familiar with, um, your physical limitations. Which of course I always ask client about prior injuries, I ask them about, you know, if they have any, uh, chronic or nagging pain now.
And then we start to do, um, sort of movement assessments, uh, about, you know, what could be kind of—we—we kind of trace back what could be the cause of that pain. Um, a tell-tale, uh, is all or rather a, um—you know, often clients will come to me and say, “Well, you know, my knee hurts, you know, I’m having some knee pain.” And they might think that, “You know, well okay, the knee hurts, so therefore the knee must be where the problem is. There must be some dysfunction with the knee.” And that’s rarely the case.
Um, usually the problems are upstream in the kinetic chain or downstream, or sometimes both, from where the chronic pain is. And the chronic pain is really just actually an indicator of a compensation that is no longer working, right? So we start—I start to do these movement assessments, find out where the individual is kind of having—has adopted maybe a compensation, or has a—has developed a muscle imbalance, uh, or some less than optimal motor pattern. And then we will start to address through, um, uh, things like foam rolling, stretching, muscle activation—uh, we start to address their unique, uh, mobility limitations and needs.
[35:57] Bill I think that’s great. Again, back to—we all start—we started on this topic: attorneys don’t have a lot of time. So I think by contacting you, all that—maybe they’d have to be—online looking up research and just blowing a lot of time trying to figure this out when they could just call you. So for our attorney, uh, audience, uh, Brian, how do they get a hold of you? I see your—your website is lawandmotion.com. Lawandmotion.com. Is your contact information on the website? Is that the best way to get a hold of you?
[36:27] Brian It sure is. Uh, you can also reach me at lawandmotionfitness@gmail.com. Uh, so that’s a reliable email. But of course lawandmotion.com, uh, that’s my website. Uh, you can click to contact me there. Um, yes.
[36:42] Bill Outstanding. Brian, thank you so much for being, uh, on the podcast. I definitely want you back on because I think things—particularly as we come out of COVID and I think we’re gonna get some great feedback on this—there may be some certain aspect that we may want to focus on next time. But certainly want to have you back on because I really think—particularly for attorneys and the trial attorneys I work on them—I think a healthy, active attorney is a better attorney. And again, thank you so much for your time.
[37:10] Brian Bill, thank you so much for having me on here. It’s a pleasure to talk to you. It’s a pleasure to, uh, to talk to your audience.
[37:18] Bill Outstanding. And for our audience, thank you so much for participating in this edition of the Litigation Psychology Podcast. We will see you next time.
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